Tag: artificial intelligence

How On Earth Will OpenAI Hit $129 Billion in Four Years?!

Chart The Information

I’ve been traveling for the past week, and ignoring the news as best as one can while on the road. But when The Information posted this doozy of a story – OpenAI Forecasts Revenue Topping $125 Billion in 2029 as Agents, New Products Gain – I made a note to myself: Grok those numbers, and see what on earth is going on.

By the time I got home, Ed Zitron, currently the tech world’s most fervid antagonist – had beat me to it. Zitron dissembled The Information’s reporting, noting that the piece takes “great pains to accept literally everything that OpenAI says as perfectly reasonable, if not gospel, even if said things make absolutely no sense.”

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Who Owns Your AI Identity? (Hint: Not You)

As generative AI reaches a fever pitch of investment, product releases, and hype, most of us have ignored a profound flaw as we march relentlessly toward The Next Big Thing. Our most dominant AI products and services (those from OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, for example) are deployed in the cloud via a “client-server” architecture – “a computing model where resources, such as applications, data, and services, are provided by a central server, and clients request access to these resources from the server.”

Now, what’s wrong with that? Technically, nothing.  A client-server approach isn’t controversial; in fact, it’s an efficient and productive approach for a company offering data-processing products and services.  The client – that’s be you and your device – provides input (a prompt, for example) which is relayed to the server. The server takes that input, processes it, and delivers an output back to the client.

Non-controversial, right? Well, sure, if the “server” in question is a neutral platform that’s only in the business of processing your data so you can use the services it offers. Banks, for example, use neutral client-server architectures to provide online financial services, as do most health care providers. The data you share with them isn’t used for anything other than the provision of services.

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Should AI Write Our Fiction?

I’m going to try to write something difficult. I don’t know if I’m going to pull it off, but that’s kind of the point. This is how writers improve: We tackle something we’re not sure we can do. Along the way, I am committing a minor sin in the world of writing – I am writing about writing.

But wait, don’t bail, here’s a topical tidbit to keep you engaged: I’m also going to write about AI, and who doesn’t want to hear more about that?! My prompt, as it were, is “Audience of One,” a post by Mario Gabriele, who writes the interesting and hyperbolic newsletter The Generalist. Gabriele’s optimistic prose focuses on venture, startups, tech, and tech culture. I find his work thought provoking and sometimes infuriating. “Audience of One” falls into the latter category.

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The Tragedy of Generative AI 

Yes, I have no patience for perfecting image prompts using AI.

Listen up, tech oligarchs; lend an ear, simpering brohanions. We’re doing this generative AI thing all wrong, and if you continue down your current path, your house of cards will fall, leaving all of us wanting, but most importantly, leaving you out of power. And given that you value power over all else, it strikes me it might be in your own self interest to consider an alternate path. 

Here’s the problem: you’ve managed to convince nearly all of us that sometime real soon, generative AI will deliver us powerful services that will automate nearly every difficult and/or deadly boring task we currently have to perform. From booking complex yet perfectly priced itineraries to delivering personalized health diagnoses that vastly outperform even the most cogent physician, your AI agents have us starstruck, bedazzled, and breath-baited.* 

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Consume First, Deal with the Shit Later

https://dailymontanan.com/2021/06/12/big-bad-forest-clear-cutting-continues/

Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones) – 404 Media

***

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Can GenAI Change Big Companies?

A quick note to point you toward this piece I wrote for P&G’s Signal publication. Since its inception, I’ve been co-editor of the monthly outlet, which covers innovation in large enterprise. This month I went in search of proof that the hype around generative AI – fueled in large part by both Google and Microsoft – had any merit. Turns out, it actually does. It’s still early, but the two examples I found, at Air India and Bayer, show tangible results and some promising implications for more impact to come.

Back in the day, I used to cover what was once called “corporate computing.” I got to dust off some old skills and talk to some interesting folks. Give it a read, and let me know what you think.

Working with AI in the Enterprise

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Will GenAI Kill The Web?

The Atlantic is out with a delicious piece of doomerism: It’s The End of the Web As We Know It. Were it not for the authors, Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier, I’d have passed right on by, because well-respected publications have been proclaiming the death of the Web for more than a decade. By and large they’ve been proven directionally right, but it’s taking a lot longer than most predicted. Much like the Earth’s coral reefs, the Web has been dying off in waves. In their piece, Donath and Schneier argue that generative AI augurs the Web’s final stage of life. The coup de GPT, if you will.

Donath and Schneier are more thoughtful than your average trend-spotting feature writers. Donath, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, is the kind of digital polymath I’ve admired for years, but who’s been relatively quiet of late. No longer. And Schneier, a security expert, writes smart stuff about nearly everything I care about as it relates to the Internet. It’s fair to say I’ll read just about anything he writes.

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Mine, Mine, All Mine

The original MusicPlasma interface. Author’s musical preferences not included…
  1. No Longer Mine 

When I write, I like to listen to music. Most of my first book was written to a series of CDs I purchased from Amazon and ripped to my Mac – early turn of the century electronica, for the most part – Prodigy, Moby, Fat Boy Slim and the like. But as I write these words, I’m listening to an unfamiliar playlist on Spotify called “Brain Food” – and while the general vibe is close to what I want, something is missing.  

This got me thinking about my music collection – or, more accurately, the fact that I no longer have a music collection. I once considered myself pretty connected to a certain part of the scene – I’d buy 10 or 15 albums a month, and I’d spend hours each day consuming and considering new music, usually while working or writing. Digital technologies were actually pretty useful in this pursuit – when Spotify launched in 2008, I used it to curate playlists of the music I had purchased – it’s hard to believe, but back then, you could organize Spotify around your collection, tracks that lived on your computer, tracks that, for all intents and purposes, you owned. Spotify was like having a magic digital assistant that made my ownership that much more powerful. 

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Larry Lessig – Why Can’t We Regulate the Internet Like We Regulate Real Space?

Wikipedia

I’ve known Larry Lessig for more than 25 years, and throughout that time, I’ve looked to him for wisdom – and a bit of pique – when it comes to understanding the complex interplay of law, technology, and the future of the Internet. Lessig is currently the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. He also taught at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He is the author of more than half a dozen books, most of which have deeply impacted my own thinking and writing.

As part of an ongoing speaker series “The Internet We Deserve,” a collaboration with Northeastern’s Burnes Center For Social Change, I had a chance to sit down with Lessig and conduct a wide-ranging discussion covering his views on the impact of money in government’s role as a regulator of last resort. Lessig is particularly concerned about today’s AI-driven information environment, which he says has polluted public discourse and threatens our ability to conduct democratic processes like elections. Below is a transcript of our conversation, which, caveat emptor, is an edited version of AI-assisted output. The video can be found here, and embedded at the bottom of this article.

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Google’s On The Field Now. Is It Being Too Cautious?

Google’s Gemini launch.

As hype escalated around the debut of ChatGPT more than a year ago, I predicted that OpenAI and Microsoft would rapidly develop consumer subscription service models for their nascent businesses. Later that year I wrote a piece speculating that Google would inevitably follow suit. If Google was smart, and careful, it had a chance to become “the world’s largest subscription service.” From that piece:

Google can’t afford to fall behind as its closest competitors throw massive resources at AI-driven products and services. But beyond keeping up, Google finds itself in an even higher-stakes transition: Its core business, search, may be shifting into an entirely new consumer model that threatens the very foundation of the company’s cash flow spigot: Advertising. 

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